Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Managing the Edge: The Editor as DJ

Another one of my 06 predictions was that this would be the year that managers at the edge would evolve to being something like DJs - that new management innovation emerged to let firms really begin building edge competencies.

The meme is already starting to take shape (and this).

The delicious irony is that all this is coming from a fun blog called Publishing 2.0, by Scott Karp, who does strategy for Atlantic Media - and one of my predictions for 05 was exactly called Publishing 2.0; the death and rebirth of the publishing industry. Very nice - Scott, if you have a min, check out my presentations :)

Of course, the call for synthesis in this post also misses half the equation - reconstructors like Memeorandum are valuable because they synthesize, or reconstruct microchunks into coherent streams of attention.

The shift away from manager at the core to DJesque choreographer at the edge is something many of us have felt for a long time; the problem, of course, has been the "cannibalization" of traditional media business models - they can't capture any value from conversation.

That's why media needs edge competencies. Management innovation has to be backed up with business model innovation, and, often, product/service innovation. Edge competencies are the unificiation of all these.

-- umair // 3:20 AM // 0 comments

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